Other Landscapes
Thalia Vrachopoulos
While it is true that Eel Kwon Kim’s landscapes are abstracted, they are not a result of a reductive process. On the contrary, they emerge like Athena from Zeus’ head, fully matured from the artist’s imagination. While representational landscapes act as potent signs of a specific place or class, Kim’s evocative landscapes are more ethereal. In them is a space for dreaming, an alternative to the city or suburb of reality, a place where anything is possible.
Traditional landscapes are easily dismissed as decorative, yet have functioned throughout history as a social cipher whose content is replete with ideology, place and politics. For Kim, it is not critical to examine environmental or political issues, but rather espouse all humanist content affording the viewer the feeling of space and possibility of hope.
Kim’s titles, such as 02-28-05, February 20, 2005, are date-specific and, in this sense, they can be related to On Kawara’s date paintings, while his landscapes are timeless and phantasmagoric. The time element also plays a crucial role in Kim’s landscapes–but not to the extent of Kawara who destroys his dated work if not finished the same day–it serves as a marker for remembering time extended to fit his own needs, as if asserting the day’s extension into imaginary time to become the sublime landscape.
Kim’s colors are expertly blended to arrive at a softness, a dreamy blurriness in tones, that have developed from his last body of work into even softer greens, plums and umbers. As seen in his 05-20-03, May 20th, 2005, there are underlying blues mixed with soft yellows to arrive at the ever-so-gentle greens of this landscape. His coloration does not so much suggest a time of day, a setting, lighting condition or weather effect. Rather, Kim’s paintings evince the artist’s interest in manifesting his own imaginary place and time.
Kim’s poetic content reveals the artist’s dedication to exploring an ever-greater virtuosity.
